Your first stumbling steps into Rapture aren’t just frightening — though they are, given that you’ve just witnessed a murder and are yet unaware just how effective a killing machine you’ll become — they’re downright mysterious.

As in many games, you arrive in Rapture after some calamity with no understanding of what preceded you. Luggage is strewn throughout the wrecked bathysphere docks, the suitcases’ owners nowhere in sight. Once life existed here, but what happened to the people?

The tale is slowly illuminated through remnants of the city’s former life. Records made by people going about their days begin to turn up — literal reel-to-reel tape recordings left by citizens of Rapture. Like some 1950s Indiana Jones, you find and listen to archaeological bits of the past, piecing together this place from its many voices.

Of course, this method was old hat even by the time we first found ourselves swimming for our lives as BioShock‘s passenger plane sank into the icy depths of the Atlantic. Fans of System Shock 2 (a game I didn’t play until years later) would recognize the worn trappings instantly. Like so many other games since, BioShock was a post-apocalypse coughing up its many death rattles to explain itself. We missed the world and found only its slowly decaying corpse.

Audio logs, those bits of recordings that serve as tidbits of story recorded by multiple (usually long dead) characters, might have seemed novel even as late as 2008. They were the primary means of imparting the story of Rapture in BioShock, and have been much emulated throughout games ever since. But audio logs, as it turns out, are the QTEs of storytelling. They’re a cheap and dirty shortcut games use to masquerade as if they have full, fleshy worlds, allowing developers to get by with portraying only the bones of those worlds to players. And it’s time we demanded more of games that mean to tell stories.

Characters Without Character

The simple, primary trouble with the ubiquity of the audio log is that it serves as a shortcut for games to dodge including actual characters. Every game from BioShock to Dead Space to the recent Alien: Isolation uses logs in this way. You don’t need to have players interact with anyone if you can give the illusion of interaction.

Audio logs, as it turns out, are the QTEs of storytelling.

Take Dead Space as an example. Audio logs serve the game as a dispensary of information, from exposition to tutorial. You learn early from a log that the best means of fighting necromorphs is through dismemberment, as you listen to one Ishimura engineer warn others with what he’s learned through experience.

Then you get audio logs chronicling the efforts of some of the characters to stop the necromorph threat, and their failures, and eventually you get enough information to piece together how the Ishimura wound up an overrun monster-filled haunted house. You hear the story of two doctors, one a religious fanatic and one increasingly worried that the situation is bad and getting worse. You hear their arguments, you get the sense of some conspiratorial discussions with other characters, and ultimately one is a bad guy you watch get killed and the other becomes your Buddy on the Radio Who Gives Instructions.

The point is that you don’t see any scenes in which these two characters interact. They don’t really interact with you, either, except to occasionally monologize. There are no cutscenes with these guys, they only have to be rendered on-screen once or twice, and yet you feel that they’re people who have done things and have story. You get expository background information about them without ever having to actually deal with them.

The Dead Space franchise received a fair amount of criticism for dropping sci-fi horror for sci-fi action, but all things considered, it was still a pretty fun series.

Visceral Games general manager Steve Papoutsis agrees, and in a recent interview reiterated the point that Dead Space definitely isn’t dead. In fact, Papoutsis went so far as to say the brand was important to EA, and that he’d like to see a new sequel for the current console generation.

“Is Dead Space dead?” Papoutsis told Kotaku UK. “Not for me it’s not. I love it, the team at Visceral loves it. Having worked on it for seven years, this was a good break for us to try something different. But there’s a lot of passion about that franchise, not just from me but from others in the company, so I think it’s an IP that’s important for the company. You never know where it’s going to go… I’d definitely be excited about what it would be like on this gen.”

The latest game in the series was 2013′s Dead Space 3, which reviewed well, but didn’t ship as many copies as originally hoped. Visceral Games ended up setting the series aside to focus on the new Battlefield game, but hope remains that Dead Space could one day make a comeback. That sentiment was shared by EA’s Patrick Soderlund last year, who described the franchise as being “close to Electronic Arts’ heart”.

]]>http://www.gamefront.com/dead-space-isnt-dead-may-return-this-gen/feed/4Jimquisition: The Games Industry is Full of Cowardshttp://www.gamefront.com/jimquisition-the-games-industry-is-full-of-cowards/
http://www.gamefront.com/jimquisition-the-games-industry-is-full-of-cowards/#commentsTue, 08 Apr 2014 00:56:35 +0000Phil Hornshawhttp://www.gamefront.com/?p=269730

In the latest episode of the Jimquisition, The Escapist Reviews Editor Jim Sterling looks at Bravely Default — a game whose success has caused Square Enix to think it should be making more of the games it has always been known for and have always been good at delivering.

From Jim’s perspective, it seems publishers like Square and Capcom (and everyone else) convinced themselves their popular games were going to fail, or that they weren’t actually all that popular, and that’s why we ended up with action-heavy Resident Evil, mainstreamed Final Fantasy, and a lots of other not-really-great ideas. It’s a pretty compelling argument.

Also at issue are inflating budgets and an expectation of selling crazy numbers of copies and making crazy money. It seems to me that ever since the Call of Duty franchise cracked a billion dollars in a single year’s sales, a great many decisions with rival game publishers have been angled in an attempt at finding a way to bake that kind of bread. So while an abject fear of imagined failure is definitely part of the story, with game companies often fleeing from niches even if they’re profitable, I can’t help but think it’s not the whole story — but then, Jim has said as much before as well.

Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation sounds like it will be a welcome addition to the survival-horror genre. Our Phil Hornshaw said the emphasis on horror is a welcome change of scope for the franchise, and Alien: Isolation “…seems to be the Alien game we’ve all been waiting for,” among other positives, which is already more praise than Aliens: Colonial Marines ever got.

So it’s no surprise that Creative Assembly’s developers are comparing Alien: Isolation to some of the other big names in survival horror — the Resident Evil and Dead Space franchises, to be specific. In a post over on Edge Online, Alien: Isolation Creative Director Alistair Hope talks about the transformation of both franchises, and how neither is really about survival or horror anymore. (emphasis added)

“I think this team really got a lot out of Dead Space 1 and Resident Evil,” creative director Alistair Hope says. “But those franchises moved in a direction that isn’t… Well, I think that fans of those originals have been marginalised and sometimes it feels like these days they’re just a couple of degrees away from being Gears Of War.” Lead designer Gary Napper agrees. “Cinematic set-pieces and loads of guns isn’t quite the ‘hiding in the cupboard’ experience I got in the old days of horror gaming,” he says. “But that stuff has been embraced by the indie community who are producing these high fidelity games that are tense and atmospheric. It’s not often you get to do that in the triple-A space.”

If you compare Dead Space 3 and Resident Evil 6 to earlier entries in the respective franchises, there’s definitely been a shift from survival horror to…survival-action horror? More run & gun, more big weapons, more expansive environments, and less hiding from the unknown and unthinkable. That doesn’t mean these franchises have taken a turn for the worse, per se, and that’s not what the CA devs are getting at either. But both franchises, seen as survival horror pioneers, have moved away from their roots, without a doubt.

Dead Space 4 isn’t in development, but the series isn’t dead. At least, that’s what EA claims.

Speaking to Eurogamer, EA Games Label chief Patrick Soderlund explained that the Dead Space series remains alive, but no studio is presently making any games set in the franchise. Its key developers, Visceral, are said to be working on something completely different.

“Dead Space remains a brand that is close to Electronic Arts’ heart. It’s been a great brand for us done by a very passionate team.

“Is that team working on a Dead Space game today? No they’re not. They’re working on something else very exciting. You have to think of it from that perspective. Is it better to put them on the fourth version of a game they’ve done three previous versions of before? Or is it better to put them on something new that they want to build, that they have passion for?

Soderlund says that while Dead Space isn’t dead, there’s no telling whether there will be another game set in the series. We can only hope that we won’t have long to wait for them to resume the franchise.

]]>http://www.gamefront.com/dead-space-isnt-dead-but-dead-space-4-is-not-in-development/feed/4Check Out This Working Plasma Cutter from Dead Spacehttp://www.gamefront.com/check-out-this-working-plasma-cutter-from-dead-space/
http://www.gamefront.com/check-out-this-working-plasma-cutter-from-dead-space/#commentsSun, 05 May 2013 22:14:53 +0000Ian Miles Cheonghttp://www.gamefront.com/?p=219888

The first weapon you get to use in Dead Space is the Plasma Cutter (seen above), iconic for being the weapon wielded by the game’s protagonist on the cover of the box, and in most of its promotional screenshots.

Though originally designed as a space engineering tool, the Plasma Cutter has been repurposed for necromorph killing. In the game, the Plasma Cutter fires arcs of superheated plasma, and is capable of cutting through the flesh and bones of necromorphs from a distance.

We’ve always wondered what it would be like if the Plasma Cutter existed in real life. To that end, Youtuber AnselmoFanZero has put together a working Plasma Cutter that runs on Li Ion cells with three 30mW green lasers for aiming and a 1.5W blue laser for burning. It’s made entirely from scratch with mostly aluminum sheets and handpainted to look like the weapon in Dead Space.

What’s interesting about the real-life Plasma Cutter is how it even has built-in rotator cuff so it can rotate horizontally the same way the weapon in the game does. There’s even a quick loading port for swapping the batteries.

While it doesn’t quite fire arcs of superheated plasma, it’s certainly the closest thing we’ll see to it for now.

EA has won the “award” again this year, and despite the fact that the voting is obviously flawed and the poll obviously meaningless, the whole controversy is doing well to draw attention away from real issues concerning Electronic Arts and its customers. In response to EA hitting the “finals” last week — as the poll is again being dominated by angry people on the Internet, and not by a real debate over which companies are actually worth chastising — EA Chief Operating Officer Peter Moore wrote a blog post for the company with the title, “We Can Do Better.” The apparent mea culpa on EA’s practices drew a lot of positive comments from the gaming industry, including from developers and journalists.

The trouble here is that Moore’s letter is a bait-and-switch of feel-good language that hides EA’s greater issues while pretending to own up to them. Sure, EA is not the worst company in America, but Moore’s letter is a distraction meant to take the heat off. Even the subheader of the post, “The tallest tree catches the most wind,” serves to take EA off the hook for its practices. Obviously, being awesome and huge, EA will get (undue) scrutiny, Moore implies.

The post itself is sure to dodge the bullet proposed by its headline, first and foremost: it never commits to saying what EA is doing wrong, or what it means to do to “be better,” and only owns up to the botched launch of SimCity as a problem for the company. Instead, Moore spends the bulk of his time propping up a few strawmen that he can knock down, the biggest and most troublesome of which is the idea that the people voting EA as worst company are doing so because they hate gay people:

“In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.

“That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we’re not caving on that.”

EA has caught flak, as have developers such as BioWare, over issues of same-sex politics such as this one, but I think it’s entirely facetious for EA to equate the reasons why gamers dislike the company with some political campaign waged by conservatives, many (possibly most, maybe all) of whom are not EA’s core customers. After all, a similar attack was aimed by conservatives at JC Penney over images in its catalogs, and that company didn’t end up a finalist on Consumerist’s poll. In a story from Polygon, Consumerist’s Chris Morran addresses this issue directly:

“If there is such a campaign, the people involved in it have not reached out to us, nor have we seen evidence of this traffic to our pages,” Morran wrote. “EA received hundreds of nominations from Consumerist readers this year, by far the most of any contender in the bracket, but not a single one mentioned anything about sexual orientation.”

How do you join an organization with the reputation of Darth Vader, only to leave it with the reputation of Emperor Palpatine? In the wake of the surprise — kind of — departure of Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello, set to vacate the lead position at the publishing giant at the end of March, we might now have a blueprint.

Since 2007, both Electronic Arts and the gaming industry as a whole have gone through incredible changes and endured significant challenges. When he assumed command, Riccitiello brought with him a new direction for the company that emphasized digital distribution and downloadable content, initiatives that have since swept through the gaming industry. But the company also was hit hard by the beginnings of the Great Recession in 2008, and even as EA has pushed into new frontiers such as mobile gaming, the company’s stock price has been consistently battered, and EA has frequently failed to hit earnings projections.

Add to this the fact that during Riccitiello’s tenure, EA’s public profile transformed from that of a frequently criticized destroyer of small publishers and factory for endlessly iterated content, to that of a metanym for gaming industry corruption and bad faith relations with the video gaming public. But is this fair? True, Riccitiello’s EA was voted Consumerist’s “Worst Company in America” in 2012 for many a misstep in dealing with customers, and for business practices that many have said are anti-consumer. But during that same time, EA was named among the “Best Places to Work for LGBT Equality” by the Human Rights Campaign. Riccitiello’s term as the head of EA is as nuanced as it is tumultuous, and his departure may well have far-reaching consequences for both the company and the video game industry.

Certainly, as the man at the top, the company’s fortunes were ultimately his responsibility, but that raises the question: Just what were EA’s fortunes?

Unfortunately, Awakened is not disturbing. It hits a few notes that Dead Space 3 could have gone to more often, and it brings us back for a few more bits of content on both the icy Tau Volantis and its orbiting wrecked fleet, but it does little more than march us over the same ground — sometimes literally — before systematically ravaging its own narrative and that of Dead Space 3.

Awakened is post-ending content, as it turns out, picking up where that post-credits “Ellie?” radio signal left off. Turns out, protagonist Isaac Clarke and co-op buddy John Carver weren’t killed when they destroyed that big evil necromorph moon at the end of the game. They wind up back on the surface of Tau Volantis, thoroughly confused that they’re not dead, and finding themselves hallucinating as they try to escape the planet and return to Earth.

There’s good and bad in this scenario. For a start, it’s not like this content is exactly a surprise to us here at Game Front (and hopefully you, if you read our stuff), given that whole “Brother Moons Are Awake” secret message. In fact, the scenario of Awakened is pretty much what we speculated it to be — the “moon network” is active, it’s evil, and it’s restarted the necromorph threat. While Isaac and Carver figure they’ve stopped the necromorphs at the conclusion of Dead Space 3, you won’t be shocked at all to learn, nope, not quite.

So for the next 90 minutes or so, players head back through the complex on Tau Volantis they’ve already covered, and you’ll easily recognize a number of locations you’ve already visited. Isaac and Carver go looking for a ship to get them off-planet, figuring Unitologist leader Danik had so many dudes looking for them during Dead Space 3, there has to be a ship around.

Dead Space 3 sees the release of its first story-based DLC, Awakened, which takes place after the events of the single-player campaign. It comes with both single-player and co-op support so players can go it alone as Isaac Clarke or join forces with John Carver as they face a daunting journey ahead of them.

As madness takes a hold of both Clarke and Carver, the duo can no longer trust what they see—or each other. Together the two must find a way off Tau Volantis, repair their ship, and find their way back to Earth.

Dead Space 3: Awakened is available today on the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, and Origin for the PC. It’ll cost you $9.99.

We have a little more information about what to expect from Dead Space 3‘s story DLC, “Awakened,” and it looks to be a lot of crazy hallucinatory madness.

The trailer for the DLC is below, and while it’s really disjointed, it does hint at a few interesting story bits. First up, there seems to be some emphasis on dreams and hallucinations. Isaac is clearly experiencing something weird in the pack, and we see shots of him back on Lunar Colony as well as on Tau Volantis with Carver. The twitchiness of some characters seems to suggest that whether they’re actually real and present or not is a matter of some debate as well.

Dead Space 3 has a long history of dealing with insanity and hallucinations, and Dead Space 3 keeps those elements curiously absent for players experiencing Isaac’s story. It seems like we’ll be getting more of that weirdness again, the visual style of which harkens back to the original Dead Space in a very good way.

Warning! I’m about to go into Dead Space 3 story spoilers. Skip this bit if you haven’t finished the game and whatnot.

As for how this DLC is going to work, however, that remains a mystery. We have a little information about the whole thing, but not much. For instance, we know about the hidden message spelled out with Dead Space 3′s chapter titles, which says “Brother Moons Are Awake.” Taking information from the plot of Dead Space 3 and its ending, we know that the brother moons, or brethren moons, are actually giant Necromorphs created through the process of “Convergence” that almost happened on The Sprawl in Dead Space 2. That all suggests to me that “Awakened” concerns the brethren moons.

That said, the ending of Dead Space 3 is ambiguous at best. Isaac is left for dead on Tau Volantis, though a post-credits moment suggests he survived the final encounter with the Tau Volantis brethren moon. So what exactly is “Awakened?” If it’s about the moons, does that make it post-endgame DLC? Or is it a sidestory inserted into the middle of the game, and if that’s the case, what exactly is the context of the term “Awakened?”

I’m at a loss for answers just yet, but “Awakened” drops Tuesday, March 12, so stay tuned next week for a review and full coverage from us, plus lots more story speculation.

EA Games CFO Blake Jorgensen stated last week that future EA Games titles would offer microtransactions as a core part of the experience like Dead Space 3. His comments, which were interpreted as a tacit confirmation of the publisher’s desire to implement microtransactions into each and all of its titles, invited a flurry of angry responses from the gaming community. He said:

“We are building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way; to get to a higher level. And consumers are enjoying and embracing that way of business.”

Today, Jorgensen added some clarification to his previous statement. He says he did not mean to imply that every game would actually offer microtransactions—only that the company would have the ability to do so.

Jorgensen says that his previous statement was in reference to the new technology that EA is developing that will allow the publisher and its developers to handle in-house credit card processing, digital downloads and properly manage microtransactions (via Polygon). He made his statements at today’s Wedbush Technology Conference in New York.

“I made a statement in the conference along the lines of ‘We’ll have micro-transactions in our games’ and the community read that to mean all our games, and that’s really not true… All of our mobile games will have micro-transactions in them, because almost all of them are going to a world where they are play for free.”

While there’s nothing wrong with microtransactions in principle, it remains to be seen how EA plans to implement them in its future pay-to-play PC and console titles.

Now that Cliff Bleszinksi, one of the fathers of Gears of War, has cut loose from Epic Games, he has time to be more opinionated and vocal on the Internet. That’s good for us — Bleszinski offers some interesting perspectives on a lot of video game issues — but when it comes to his defense of micro-transactions, I must disagree.

Cliffy B, as he’s often known, published a blog post this week in which he defends the micro-transaction model and game publishers at large as they continue in their never-ending quest to make money. In it, he takes the point that players complaining about micro-transactions are complaining for no reason.

“Those companies that put these products out? They’re for profit businesses. They exist to produce, market, and ship great games ultimately for one purpose. First, for money, then, for acclaim. …And when those companies are publicly traded on the stock market they’re forced to answer to their shareholders. …To produce a high quality game it takes tens of millions of dollars, and when you add in marketing that can get up to 100+ million. …Adjusted for inflation, your average video game is actually cheaper than it ever has been. …Another factor to consider is the fact that many game development studios are in places like the San Francisco bay area, where the cost of living is extraordinarily high. … Those talented artists, programmers, designers, and producers that spent their time building the game you love? They need to eat and feed their families. (Something that the hipster/boomerang kid generation seems to forget all too often.)”

I don’t disagree on the ins and outs of capitalism, but rather, the means through which the games industry means to capitalize on us, the player population. We’ve already had the discussion of whether it’s okay for developers and publishers to cut back the value of games by walling off some content after selling consumers a game on a disc. From a cost perspective, Bleszinski seems to think this is inevitable; games are expensive and will get more expensive, and publishers and developers will search for ways to make paying for games palatable to consumers. What I think he misses about this discussion is that micro-transactions (MTX for short), Day One DLC and other practices in this vein actually hurt the quality of games. We see this all the time on the mobile front: Games that are made worse through design as a means of forcing players to pay more for them, with designers putting in systems that make games less fun on purpose. That’s the real threat of the micro-transaction, Day One DLC future.

Let’s take for example Dead Space 3. This is a game that includes a huge and robust crafting system and is overflowing with various resources throughout the game, all of which factor into that weapon-crafting mechanic. It’s also a game that implements MTX well; that is to say, players don’t trip over micro-transactions if they don’t want to. MTX is implemented as an option for players who want to speed up their progress through the game, for whom time might be limited, or who are willing to spend a little more for the opportunity to d–k around with powerful gear. In this case, in theory, this is fine. Visceral Games supports another option for players to engage with the game on their own terms.

But publisher Electronic Arts, which owns Visceral, has said that every game it publishes going forward will include MTX, and that’s where things get problematic. In the case of Dead Space 3, these transactions allow players to spend real money in order to speed their progress through the game — you can pay to remove what is ostensibly a barrier to fun. It’s a speedier path through the game that avoids grinding. But if players prove to EA that they’re willing to pay for the chance to skip over searching for resources to get better weapons, doesn’t that give EA a financial incentive to put other things into their game that players will want to skip? It might not be bad in Dead Space 3, but if EA is adding these transactions into every game it ships, how long until it succumbs to the temptation to start adding un-fun systems to entice players to spend?

In mobile titles such as Real Racing 3, another EA game that just released for free for iOS and Android mobile platforms, premium currency paid for through MTX allows players to speed up a number of timers that pop up through the course of play. As you use your race cars in the game, they wear down and must be maintained and repaired, and each of those repairs activates a timer that players must wait through before they can play again. This is the free-to-play model a number of mobile and social games use — the game allows you to play it for a while, then literally stops you and forces you to wait, unless you’re willing to give it some money to play again.

Think about it: In order to entice people to pay for Real Racing 3, its developers have actively tried to inhibit players from having fun. They’ve made the game worse, hoping you’ll pay to make it better. Critics reviewing Real Racing 3 say MTX ruins this entry into a much-lauded series. But at least that game is free to download — how long until we’re seeing a similar model in EA’s PC and console games, as, brick by brick, they’re slipped into the design? We’re already seeing MTX in a crafting system; maybe next time, Dead Space’s resources will be a little scarcer and the micro-transactions a little more enticing.

This review focuses primarily on how well the PC version of Dead Space 3 plays, and is a supplement to our original Dead Space 3 review. We’ve already covered other aspects of the game like horror, story, controls and more, so if that’s what you’re looking for, check out our original review of Dead Space 3 for a more details.

Papoutsis said Visceral was doing its best to make all versions of the game look good, and didn’t want visual fidelity in one version to be leaps and bounds ahead of another. Roughly translated, however, that made it sound as though Visceral was putting together little more than a straight port — a version of the console game that was barely tuned to PC and had minimum effort put in to allow gamers to maximize the game with their hardware. Needless to say, people were upset.

Visceral has done straight ports before: The original Dead Space is a pretty dreadful port directly from Xbox to your PC, and the result is weak keyboard-and-mouse controls, zero graphical adjustment options, and the not-quite-but-kind-of requirement to play it with a gamepad. With Dead Space 2, there was significant improvement in the PC version, though the game was still specifically geared toward console.

In Dead Space 3, Visceral has done more than just port the game straight over from consoles. PC players have more options and the game looks and handles better on PC for the most part. It’s not nearly as bad as many PC gamers had feared; instead, Visceral has delivered an experience that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with its console brethren, although it doesn’t quite blow the consoles away.

As discussed last time in our primary review of Dead Space 3, this entry into the series is quite a bit larger than the previous ones, and it’s also a bit more action-oriented than horror-oriented. I spent my time with the PC version of Dead Space 3 with the difficulty cranked up to Impossible, and if you’re looking for a tougher, scarier experience, that’s a good way to get it. Every encounter takes on quite a bit more lethality on the highest difficulty, and resources are somewhat more sparse.

Dead Space 3 excels in a lot of great ways as an evolution of the series. There’s still a lot of action to be had here, even if the game is less scary than its predecessors. It’s also huge — probably around 20 hours when adding in all side quests and cooperative quests — so players can expect a lot of content for their buck, especially with unlockable modes like New Game +. The core gameplay that makes Dead Space fun persists, and surrounding it are a number of new features, most of which aren’t bad or at least don’t get in the way.

While Dead Space 3 might suffer from some bloat, the majority of its new stuff isn’t a detriment. Co-op is nice without really adding a whole lot for the most part, and the new crafting system offers a lot to players who are interested in that sort of thing. The title could stand to be scarier and many players will lament the loss of some of the more horrific material, but the game still manages a few tense situations. It’d be nice to see a tighter story and more variety in enemies and locations, though.

During an interview with Game Front, Dead Space 3 Executive Producer Steve Papoutsis said the transactions were a means through which some players might be able to shortcut the search for materials they need, but the game was designed with the intention of keeping those transactions optional.

“One of the things that we noticed, while we were developing the game, just in gaming in general, is that some people are looking for shortcuts,” Papoutsis said. “They’re looking for ways to get through the game a little bit faster. Whether that’s just because of the limited amount of time they have, or just the way that they want to experience the game, that’s something that we’ve seen in gaming recently. And so what we thought was, if we’re going to create this resource system for our crafting, that’s an opportunity to let people kind of accelerate their game a bit.

“At the same time, something that people need to realize as they’re playing Dead Space, our chapter select system enables players at any time to go back to a previous chapter. So if you want to go back and farm for resources in an area that you’ve already cleared out, you totally can do that, and you don’t even have to interact with the MTX system if you don’t want to. So that’s been there and we decided that from Day One: we wanted to make sure players were able to do that, because for some people, time is available.”

Papoutsis also said that not needing micro-transactions to accomplish goals or create weapons is “exactly how the game was developed,” and that most players on the Normal difficulty would probably find themselves with an abundance of crafting material anyway.

“You know, we balanced the game so you’d be able to purchase all kinds of stuff with what drops in the world, and be more than amply powerful to complete the game,” he said. “As a matter of fact, we encourage players that are not new to the franchise to jump in at a higher difficulty, because that’s probably going to be more challenging for them versus playing normal. Because with normal, we wanted to make sure new players had a chance to kind of understand the game, in hopes that once they complete it and go back through in co-op, they understand the systems and now they’re motivated to try a higher difficulty, or they’re playing in New Game + modes. So the micro-transaction stuff wasn’t a huge deal for us, in terms of a balancing thing, because we were always going to allow people those other avenues to get resources.”

Some players have reacted negatively to the micro-transactions, which Papoutsis said was unfortunate because it seemed many people didn’t have all the information — namely that the MTX system is not necessary to beat the game. In fact, Game Front published a video that showed players a means of “farming” for resources at a specific point during the campaign that could theoretically award a multitude of items, should players be willing to put in the time to get them. That video kicked off speculation that Electronic Arts might patch the apparent “glitch,” as it helped circumvent micro-transactions; there also was discussion that exploiting the apparent glitch would be tantamount to stealing from Electronic Arts.

EA, however, issued a statement to Game Front that reiterated such locations were purposely built into the game, and that the MTX system was intended to be optional. Some gamers and even media outlets suggested that farming opportunities in Dead Space 3 were indeed a glitch and that EA was pivoting after realizing that patching out such issues would be difficult, costly or potentially damaging to the publisher’s image. Papoutsis’ comments suggest otherwise, though — that Dead Space 3 was never intended to have anything more than optional micro-transaction content.

Papoutsis encouraged players to interact with him about Dead Space 3 via Twitter. You can find him at @leveluptime.